


with ruthless attention

by strikinglight



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Family Drama, M/M, Minor Injuries, Snapshots, and many broken plates, big fat pre-canon to post-canon timeline, iwaizumi hajime as Just So Done With Everything, oikawa tooru as broken bird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 12:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6470152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hajime’s known Tooru since they were both too young to wear masks, since before they ever had to worry about what names to call each other by. The trouble is that Tooru knows how to be too many people at once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with ruthless attention

**Author's Note:**

> throws this on the already colossal, burning pile of iwaoi angst fics and dies
> 
> To blame for this fic in particular are [Naya Rivera's super-heart-grinding cover of "Mine" by Taylor Swift](https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=6XN2WvI00uE#Glee_-_Mine_\(Taylor_Swift_Cover\)_4x04_THE_BREAK-UP), and the spoken-word poem ["Repetition" by Phil Kaye](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EILQTDBqhPA). (It may or may not be significant that Phil Kaye has Oikawa hair, ish.)

**i.**

There’s a cabinet in one corner of the dining room at Tooru’s house, a tall elegant castle of glass and varnished wood, for the good china. Hajime’s been over enough times to know the plates in that cabinet, even if he’s never eaten from them, never even touched them, because Tooru’s always talking about them. He’s always motioning Hajime over to peek through the glass doors with his eyes shining and a secret in his voice as he uncovers the treasure hidden in his home—the white ones with their flowered borders, the glazed clay ones covered in soft rings of pale blue and green, every one of them lined up in a row and leaning gently against the wooden bars, graceful as princesses.

(These ones are from Kyoto, he always says, pointing. These ones from Korea, these ones from China. They only ever come out for special guests, or for New Year’s Eve. His special duty is to set them out for dinner, and later to dry them as his big sister Nao washes, and return them to their places afterwards. In these moments Hajime always thinks only Tooru could make chores sound so beautiful.)

When the first plate hits the floor—or maybe a little before, as his eyes follow the arc of Tooru’s mother’s arm, slicing through air that feels as if it’s turned to sludge—Hajime hears a hundred things fall, all at once.

Tooru’s father stands at the head of the table. His face is turned away from them, down toward the floor, but Hajime can see metal and stone in the way he shifts his body, becomes a wall to break against. Tooru’s mother lifts her arm again and the second plate hurtles toward the floor, and the third, and Hajime doesn’t miss the way each crash makes Tooru flinch as if he’s been struck. His face is pale now, almost as pale as the tablecloth. A cold thread of sweat runs down the side of his cheek.

For a while nothing else moves, nothing but Tooru’s mother’s arm and Nao’s hand reaching for his under the table, out of sight. Hajime catches the movement out of the corner of his eye, considers taking Tooru’s other hand, but his arm hangs useless from his shoulder, all the bones gone.

“Nao, take the boys upstairs.” Tooru’s father’s hands have curled into white-knuckled claws.

Then it’s three minutes and three hundred years later and Hajime is sitting next to Tooru on the floor of Nao’s room. She’s locking the door, pushing all her weight against it even if it slides into place without resistance. Maybe she’s hoping the added force will block out all the noise—the shouts, the shattering—even if it won’t. Hajime wonders if it will continue until they’re all gone, all those pretty plates, shards of pink and white and sky-blue strewn like petals on the tile.

Tooru says nothing, only shakes so badly Hajime can feel the tremors through the floor.

“Cover your ears,” Nao says. Her voice is yet another fragile thing, paper-thin and barely audible as she kneels in front of them, pulls them close with one arm loose around each of their necks. “Cover your ears.”

 

* * *

 

**ii.**

The day Tooru’s parents give up on each other, they send him to Hajime’s house.

“Mom’s going,” he says. After a pause, he adds, with a loud sniff and the ghost of a smile, “She’s leaving the rest of the plates.”

Hajime studies him and notes how his body has caved in—how he seems to be shrinking, spine rounded inward, shoulders down. His eyes are dry and red-rimmed, like he hasn’t slept.

“Come in,” he answers, standing aside to let Tooru enter the house. “I’m watching Jun.”

Little Junichi is two and just getting the hang of words. They find him building a wall of wooden blocks on the floor of his room, but he’s on his feet as soon as he sees them come through the door, wobbling toward them on chubby toddler legs. “Niichan! Niichan!”

He’s mastered _mama_ and _papa,_ but can’t get his tongue around either of their names just yet—for now they’re both _niichan._ The same person, split into two by magic. Hajime’s convinced Junichi will master Tooru’s name first; he can tell from the way he clings to Tooru’s knees and tugs gently at his wrists. His name is easier to say by one syllable, too. This is only mildly jealousy-inducing.

“Make house,” Junichi says. “Make house, niichan!”

If Tooru’s stung by having to think about putting things together it doesn’t show on his face at all. If anything, it’s scary how all the exhaustion seems to fall away as Tooru gets down on his knees on the carpet, begins to speak to Junichi in the softest of voices. How big does he want his house to be? What colors for the roofs and the walls? Who lives in it?

Hajime thinks of Nao, gone last spring to the big school in Tokyo she was always showing them pictures of. He thinks of Tooru’s house, just two streets away, with its tiled floors and beautiful cabinets full of small, breakable things.

“Mama,” Junichi says. “Papa. Niichan.” He looks at Tooru, then up at Hajime, standing guard over their little kingdom of wooden blocks and stuffed animals—says again, as though for emphasis, “Niichan.”

 

* * *

 

**iii.**

Four years, and Nao comes home with her face aglow and her hand in the hand of a boy from the city. One more year and they’re dressing up for her wedding, bumping shoulders in the hall bathroom at Tooru’s house, elbows knocking together as they fumble.

“That’s not how you tie a tie, Iwa-chan.” Tooru turns from the mirror and his hands go to the length of satin around Hajime’s neck, pull loose the lopsided knot. “Here, let me.”

Tying a tie leads to buttoning a vest and patting down the creases in a jacket, and soon he’s attacking Hajime’s hair with some kind of musky-smelling goop from the medicine cabinet, combing down the unruly spikes until they lie dead and subdued across his forehead. Hajime wrinkles his nose, too stiff and too hot, and swats at him.

“Stupid, it’s your sister getting married today, not me.”

He stalls then, halfway through stowing the comb back on a shelf, his face turning to glass at the words. Hajime regrets them immediately, but Tooru doesn’t even give him time—Hajime blinks, and he’s grinning. This is a signal not to fuss, not to apologize.

“You look good,” he says. “Not as good as me, though.”

His mother won’t make it today. Her gifts have made the journey from wherever she lives now on her behalf—three, four, five wrapped boxes on the dining table that the two of them have to carry out of the house and stow in the trunk of their family car. Hajime’s arms buckle under the weight of one in particular; he feels something shift inside as he lifts, hears the clink of porcelain, and hopes this isn’t foreshadowing.

Tooru looks brittle all throughout the ride to the chapel, drawing up his shoulders in the passenger seat next to his father and staring straight ahead, but by the time they actually arrive there he’s managed to rally. He steps between the pews with Hajime at his elbow, greeting aunts and uncles and family friends, hands open gracefully for their questions and their praise. How handsome he’s getting, and so tall, too. Is he twelve—thirteen now? Entering Junior High in the spring?

Thirteen years of life and Tooru already has such an extensive repertoire of smiles. Hajime can name them all; there’s the big one that cuts straight across his face when he’s excited or fired up, the smug sideways one for when he’s making jokes. There’s a smaller, softer one, the one he rarely wears because it uncovers too much of his heart. This is the one Hajime catches in accidental unguarded moments when he’s on the phone with Nao, playing finger puppets with Junichi, washing dishes in the kitchen. But today Tooru’s smiles are all armor, sliding into place over his face to hide anything that he might feel. Hajime knows he’s the only person in the room that can tell the difference.

The mask slips only once, when the big doors open and Nao enters on their father’s arm, white and shimmering from head to toe. When the congregation rises to meet her Hajime can swear Tooru’s on his feet just a few beats ahead of everybody else, neck craned toward the aisle, face alive with awe and tears standing in his eyes.

 

* * *

 

**iv.**

“Mom’s asking if you wanna stay for dinner.”

Tooru looks up from the book he’s reading, flat on his stomach on Hajime’s bed. Hajime is peering around the door, head tilted in question, feet already encased in a pair of embarrassingly fluffy white house slippers.

Tooru doesn’t say anything right away. He stays quiet, does something funny with his face—biting his lip, creasing his brow in the same small frown that he wears when he’s taking a test and waiting for the answer to come to him and click. When it does, the change is instantaneous; his head perks up, and he smiles, bright and unreserved, nearly bubbling over.

“What’s cooking?”

“Shogayaki,” Hajime says, though he knows it doesn’t really matter. Anything that isn’t an outright “No” as good as means he’ll stay, and Tooru’s never been able to say no to anything his mother cooks.

Sure enough, Tooru’s already standing, stepping into the slippers at the foot of Hajime’s bed, the ones always specifically set aside for him each time he visits—the sky-blue pair, the fluffiest pair they have. He crosses Hajime’s room in a few long strides and leads the way down the stairs, so relaxed and at ease again it’s almost as if he’s at home in Hajime’s house, as if the father and mother and brother waiting for them in the dining room are his own.

Hajime realizes, when he sees the table set for five, that it was never a question. His family adores Tooru. That much is obvious, from the way his parents’ faces light up when Tooru takes his seat, the seemingly endless list of questions they have for him about his classes, volleyball, where he’s planning to go to high school. Hajime counts his smiles and listens to his answers, notes the care with which he spoons rice into Junichi’s bowl, and figures the feeling is at least somewhat mutual.

Once in a while over the course of the meal, though, Hajime will see him falter. He never misses it, that flicker of hesitation that gives them both pause, Tooru making that little frown again and glancing across the table—like he can’t believe what he’s seeing, like he wants to pinch himself to make sure he’s really here.

After dinner, the boys always do the dishes—both of them, and Junichi on drying duty—while Hajime’s parents watch the evening news in the living room. There’s nothing special about their tableware, all undecorated white porcelain from the Sale section of the department store, but Tooru handles the plates and bowls so delicately they may as well be crystal.

 

* * *

 

**v.**

At first Kageyama is nothing more than a collection of facts. Kageyama Tobio, from Akiyama Elementary, who’s played volleyball since the second grade. Quiet and polite off the court, almost shy, oddly formal in a way that makes Hajime raise an eyebrow and bite back a snicker. On-court he’s something else entirely—so keen in his handling of the ball, so quick on the uptake their coaches only have superlatives to describe the way he plays. _Excellent. Brilliant. The best we’ve ever had._

Some people, a few of the lucky ones, are like that. Just born with the game in their future. Everyone knows he’s being groomed to play setter one day, but Tooru in particular is hyper-aware, always watching Kageyama out of the corner of one eye, throwing himself into his own practice with double his usual fierceness. Always first in the running line, always doing twelve diving drills for everyone else’s ten. It becomes at once a running joke and a common cause for concern that Tooru lives in the gym, because no one but Hajime ever sees him go home. He’s heard it circulating among the coaching staff, passed around among the underclassmen in the locker room after practice.

In turn, Hajime watches him, because this is the first time in years that he’s seen Tooru so dismantled. Hajime is quicker to anger than anyone he knows, always in a temper about something, but his is the kind that spends itself in bursts. It crackles and flares; rarely if ever does it destroy anything. Tooru’s anger is different—white-hot and seething, all quips and thorny hauteur and rare bursts of searing light that are terrifying to behold—and when it boils over Hajime has to surge to meet it, stamp it down with fighting words and a head to the face.

One of the things Hajime is intent on teaching him before they graduate is that not all fights are endings. Not all of them have the power to destroy worlds, not even the ones that end with bloody noses and bruised foreheads.

 

* * *

 

**vi.**

_I love you,_ he’s always saying. That’s his favorite joke to tell, and by virtue of their entry into the same high school and the promise of at least three more years living in close quarters Hajime hears it a hundred different ways. Quick, casual, just another substitute for _thank you_ and _good morning,_ a template answer to offers of lunch or science notes: _I love you, Iwa-chan!_ More loudly, his voice ringing out in the gym after they’ve pulled off a particularly difficult set-up, undeterred by the snickers and the eye-rolls of their teammates: _I love you!_ Singsong and sly, with one arm slung around Hajime’s neck and his mouth right up against his ear, confession letters in his pockets and boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolate littered across his desk in their classroom: _I love you, Iwa-chan, don’t be jealous, I love you._

Hajime can never quite shake the feeling that he’s lying about something, or at least obscuring the truth, walking people in circles around it with a laugh and a brilliant smile. Needling and joking and teasing, so that the eyes are always on him but they can never look too deep. But then he thinks about the rough way he pushes at Tooru, cuffs Tooru around the back of the head, pulls himself free of the tangle of Tooru’s arms with barbed words and fists full of fire— _shut up, get off, you’re so full of crap—_ and suddenly he can’t decide who the bigger liar is. Or the better actor. Probably those two are the same thing.

This becomes their favorite game. More than tic-tac-toe or arm-wrestling, in some ways more even than volleyball. If you say something over and over enough times, it loses its meaning. First it’s just that the statements come out weird, somehow lopsided on the tongue from too much repetition. Then they break down, become accidents of sound and air, and all their old power—the power to touch or to wound—evaporates.

 

* * *

 

**vii.**

In their third year, Tooru slides into the captaincy as naturally as breathing. Nothing about it is surprising. This is their second time standing at the head of a team together, after all, and at this point Hajime figures it’s a simple fact of the universe that everything Tooru touches blooms under his direction. He’s exacting and generous by turns, fiercely intelligent in his assessments and his judgment calls—sometimes even friendly, when the situation calls for it. He listens patiently to their spikers, reminds them to _describe_ the tosses they need, nodding and smiling with that ruthless attention that so disarms everyone he speaks to.

Of all of them, it’s Kunimi who’s most frustrating. He’s been a struggle to work with since junior high, committed to moving through life two steps behind everyone else. Always the last to call for a toss or to chase the ball, lukewarm and taciturn and sleepy-eyed. Loose and lazy in his movements. It would be easy—logical, even, at this point—to give up on him, switch someone else into the regular rotation, but Tooru is relentless.

“But he’s so smart, Iwa-chan,” he says, honey-sweet, placating. For emphasis he reaches across the table and touches Hajime’s wrist, cradling it with his fingertips. “And he’s good under pressure. Just let me take care of him, okay?”

 _Well,_ Hajime thinks, frowning and jerking his hand away, _that’s one way to look at it._

Tooru’s function, his dual obligation as setter and captain, is to know their teammates. As Hajime watches him work on Kunimi, it becomes obvious that what he actually _does_ is the interpersonal equivalent of turning lead into gold. The moves are subtle, easy to overlook. Just a little more attention each day, not so much as to put the pressure on, always couched in something that you could easily mistake for kindness. _How was the toss, Kunimi-chan? What do you think, Kunimi-chan? Good one, Kunimi-chan!_ The implication being, of course, that they need him. That they need all of them, if they want to be the best. No one is dispensable. No one is exempt.

As weeks turn into months and the team begins to come together into a well-oiled machine, Hajime wonders if Tooru’s noticed the fact that he’s loved. (He probably has.) He wonders if that scares him. (It must, surely.)

Hajime’s particular duty—as vice-captain, as best friend, as whatever else they might be—is to know that the love and the fear both are real, even if nobody else knows they are. His duty is to hit his fist against Tooru’s back on days that the fear seizes him—even if nobody else knows it does—and remind him. They don’t have to be a family. They just have to be themselves.

 

* * *

 

**viii.**

Much as he must hate it, Tooru can’t quite kill the part of him that startles at loud noises. A classmate knocks over the stack of books on his desk, another stands up too quickly and upsets his chair, sends it tumbling down against the tile, and something inside Tooru’s mind drags him backward through the intervening years. Hajime can imagine how the world must spin for him—suddenly he’s seven years old again and the shards cover the floor of their dining room, sky-blue and sea-green, white porcelain with pink roses—

Some days Tooru’s strong. Some days he flinches and just as quickly seems to forget, manages to swallow down the trembling. Other days it seizes his whole body before he can think himself away from it, and he has to hunch over in his seat and put his head in his hands.

Tooru never talks about the nightmares, but Hajime can guess at them just from what he sees in those moments. Tooru is seventeen and has had his own room for more than ten years, and probably figures he should have outgrown all his monsters long ago. Sometimes, though, Tooru falls asleep and the monsters win, even when he’s supposed to be safe in somebody else’s house.

Some nights Tooru doesn’t wake up, and Hajime watches him toss and tangle himself up in the folds of the guest futon. Some nights he’s pale and clammy when Hajime touches him. Other nights he wakes gasping and lets Hajime take his hand and lead him, barefoot, down to the kitchen for water.

 

* * *

 

**ix.**

“Come over,” Tooru says, with his bag hanging off one shoulder. They’re the last out of the club room as usual; his head is tipped back lazily to watch Hajime double-lock the door, and Hajime’s trying not to watch the angle of his throat in the overhead light. “Dad’s working late.”

It’s not a request. It never really is, though Tooru’s good at making it seem otherwise with other people—sugarcoating his speech, softening it with a bow and a smile and a hand on a shoulder. He also knows that today is nothing special. Tooru’s father works late every other day, and he doesn’t always need Hajime to work through the problem of an empty house. Sometimes it’s an additional hour of practice. Sometimes it’s dinner at Nao’s apartment, down the street from school, and between helping her cook and chatting with his brother-in-law and bickering with Takeru over his homework “dinner” easily eats up his whole evening, until his phone is ringing with texts that read _Where are you?_ and he has just enough time to catch the last train. It isn’t always Hajime, and it doesn’t need to be.

But sometimes it seems that it does. Hajime knows better than to ask how Tooru decides this, merely follows him into his house and up the stairs to his room, the two of them padding on socked feet side by side in the dark. He lets Tooru back him against the closed door—resenting as he always has those extra inches of height, those few finger-widths that mean Tooru has to bend, and Hajime can feel him grin white and sharp against his neck. One hand runs up his side, fingers snarling in the fabric of his shirt.

“Stay here,” Tooru tells his throat, lips ghosting against the skin. Even as the heat curling in the pit of his stomach creeps into his head Hajime still thinks only Tooru could take such needy words and turn them fierce with command. “Stay for a bit.”

Hajime’s known Tooru since they were both too young to wear masks, since before they ever had to worry about what names to call each other by. The trouble is that Tooru knows how to be too many people at once: a dozen faces and voices and selves, shuffling the cards he’s holding to find the right one for the day. “Stay,” he says, like a king, and then in the same breath, “I need you.” There is no answer but for Hajime to work his fingers into Tooru’s hair and drag his head up so they can crash mouth-to-mouth against each other, teeth clacking, Tooru’s fingers anchored on the bones of his hips and gripping tight enough to bruise.

In a while they’ll get tired of so much honesty; Hajime will know it’s time when Tooru pulls away, reaching over his head for the light switch that will magic everything into a completely different scene. They’ll sit on the floor, at the low table in the middle of the room, unzip their bags and pull out their homework. They’ll ask each other for help with physics problems, point at timelines in the pages of their history books. Out of the corner of one eye Hajime will note the mess their senior year of high school has made of Tooru’s desk, the veritable flood of university pamphlets and admissions forms, uncapped pens, DVDs in cracked plastic cases labeled with permanent marker: _Karasuno v. Datekou, Shiratorizawa 1, Shiratorizawa 2._

“I love you, Iwa-chan!” he’ll say, at the end, in lieu of a thank-you. The lines of heat Tooru’s nails raked down Hajime’s sides not more than two hours before will sting a little, undoubtedly, but he’ll take it with a shrug and a mumbled “Yeah, yeah,” as he always does. He knows—has always known—that Tooru doesn’t so much believe in love as in temporary reprieves. Tooru figures people get scared and lonely. Sometimes they find each other. Sometimes it works, at least for a while.

(“That’s all it is,” he’s said before, many times, in that strange flat voice that makes Hajime’s blood run cold, and then in the same breath, seamlessly, with the big sunny smile, “I love you, Iwa-chan!” Something in Hajime always jolts in those moments, sends an electric shock through his whole body, makes him shove Tooru away more roughly than usual.)

 

* * *

 

**x.**

Tooru’s back is all bruises from his collision with the chairs at the end of their last ever game, sickly black and purple and yellowing flowers blooming all the way down. He’s cross-legged on the floor of his room and his shirt is balled up in his lap, while Hajime sits behind him with a face towel in one hand and a bowl of ice cubes in the other. They don’t speak as Hajime bundles the ice into the towel and presses the makeshift compress to Tooru’s skin; he tenses a little at the contact, his breath hitching the slightest bit in the quiet, but doesn’t otherwise move.

The loss itself was easy to negotiate. _Is_ easy, even if the memory stings and makes Hajime’s palms burn. There had been laughter in the bus on the way home, a few tears at the last team meeting in the gym at school. There had been promises—of visits, of _next year_. It had seemed, at the time, to be enough.

Now they’re alone together, just the two of them in Tooru’s house like they’ve found themselves at least a hundred times before, and suddenly the word _loss_ means something different.

“I’m sorry.” An apology is the last thing he’s expecting. Then again, he should know better than anyone by now that assuming that Tooru will align himself with expectations is no different from walking over the edge of a cliff at night. “That one was on me."

_I. Me._ He knows this means Tooru’s alone in his head again, wandering off somewhere no one can follow him, and maybe it’s the exhaustion and the ache of the day that makes Hajime bristle at the thought.

“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “It was on us.”

Usually these kinds of discussions end there, but today Tooru pushes, twists the fabric of his shirt until his knuckles go white with effort. “But if I’d just—” He hesitates—this sets the alarm bells clamoring inside Hajime’s head—growls his frustration in the back of his throat. “I could have—”

“Will you cut it out?” It comes out sharper than intended, even if his hand continues to skim the compress lightly over Tooru’s skin, pressing down over the tender spots. It’s true that they’re shaken, and these are the first of what looks to be a long catalogue of endings—last game, last meeting, last class, last exam, last day—but the last thing he needs is for Tooru to start thinking he needs to go it alone again. “You’re talking like we weren’t there.”

“Maybe you were there.” Hajime sees the rivulets of water run slanted down his bare back as Tooru jerks his body around, and there’s so much ice in his gaze it’s nearly scorching. Everything about him suddenly is stretched tight, shrill, at snapping point. “But what about next year? The year after? And after that? Will you be there _then_?”

The implication being, of course, that they’ve blown their last chance. That nothing is forever. Hajime gets it. Tooru’s always been bad at goodbyes, but two universities on opposite sides of Tokyo City aren’t _forever,_ not even close. And forever has always been such a huge, unwieldy concept, too tangled to grasp, not even worth thinking about while they still have today.

Hajime’s always hated Tooru’s predisposition toward too much _thinking,_ how he takes words and twists them and unbalances the conversation until they’re not so much talking about the team as about the two of them, never says anything that needs saying outright. He hates it so much just this moment it makes him slam his fist down against the table so hard that he imagines that if this were a movie it would splinter. The impact shakes the room, sends ice cubes skidding across the surface and onto the floor.

“Fuck all, Oikawa, I could be.” Tooru flinches, and there’s the expected pang of regret, but Hajime pushes past it all the same. “You’re the only one who thinks I won’t.”

It’s not a promise. They don’t do promises. They don’t do love, either, and that’s fine. Seventeen years they’ve lived without having to put a name to what this is, but there’s no point if Tooru doesn’t trust it.

He has no ready answer. The silence stretches long, strangling fingers across the room.

“Look at us.” Tooru lifts the hand that’s still holding his shirt, scrubs roughly at his face with it. Hajime can’t decide if the sound he makes is a laugh or a sob. Knowing him, it’s probably both. “Fighting again.”

“We’ve been fighting all our lives, goddammit.” It comes out almost in a snarl. “We’re still here, aren’t we?”

 

* * *

 

**xi.**

“Do you think she’s happy?” Tooru asks as they watch Nao half-walk, half-drag Takeru back to where her car is parked on the corner. The other kids have long since trickled away, looking like moving bundles of coat and scarf and bonnet in the cold spring weather, hand-in-hand with their mothers.

Hajime considers this, considers Tooru’s sister and her small son and how they move, his wrist clutched tightly in her hand. They’re bickering audibly even from this distance, but quick to laugh just as loudly about something Hajime can no longer hear.

Nao is nothing like Tooru. Not so armored, for all the difference in their ages, or so deft at switching out the masks. Her own face is schooled semi-permanently into an open, sweet expression, undercut though it often is by fatigue or dismay or a kind of sheepishness. Hajime thinks fondly of how she looked up close just a few minutes ago, wrinkles mapped all the way down the front of her coat and her bun half-unraveling, spilling stray locks of long hair over one shoulder, and the breathless way she spoke—too many words at once, with no room for embroidery. _God, sorry, I’m so late, I got held up at— Takeru, what are you eat— Oh, looking good, Hajime-kun! How is everything?_

Tooru would never let him anyone see him so frazzled. But then Hajime remembers him standing transfixed as Nao passed them on her way down the aisle on her wedding day, step by measured step, graceful as a pillar of ivory. At the time he was convinced she was the only person in the world he could be certain Tooru loved. It’s gratifying somehow to find this is probably still true, if his willingness to put up with Takeru for so many afternoons is any indication. If anything, it gives his sister something to smile about when she’s tired.

What it all means, Hajime supposes—if this story of theirs does mean anything—is that they’ve all chosen their sacrifices, albeit not in so many words. Chosen to leave, stay, or find each other again, past accidents of place and time and circumstance.

“What do you think?” It’s the only way to answer the question, and to make sure that Tooru doesn’t forget.

Tooru shrugs, leaning back against the wall of the empty gym. It’s the small smile that comes out today, now that the sun is setting and there’s nobody else around. “I hope so.”

 

* * *

 

**xii.**

To move to the city is to cut your life into parts. Hajime discovers the singular difficulty of this, even with help, when he begins to unpack.

“Iwa-chan, where do you want these books?”

“Just stack them there to the left. _Left,_ I said. Did the train ride kill your sense of direction?” Hajime watches with a critical eye as Tooru lines the said books up on the floor, followed strangely enough by a do-it-yourself cardboard model of a dinosaur skeleton. “Also, careful with that; that’s from Jun.”

“Beautiful,” Tooru remarks, amused. “Do you even have shelves?”

Hajime frowns, as if this is an idea he hasn’t considered. “There’s no space for shelves. I don’t need shelves.”

“Of _course_ you need shelves. What if one day while you’re lumbering around you step on Jun-chan’s dead dinosaur?” Tooru’s still holding the model, and he takes a moment to look genuinely distressed at the possibility of Hajime crushing his younger brother’s parting gift underfoot before making an executive decision. “We’re getting shelves next Sunday.”

“Fine, if you pay for them.”

“We’ll split for them.” The dinosaur finds a temporary home at the top of the book-stack, for lack of a better place to put it. It wobbles a little as Tooru sets it down. “Is that everything?”

A pause. “There’s one last thing.”

The embarrassing truth of the matter is that Hajime’s been carrying the spare key around in his back pocket for days now. It’s just that he could never get the timing right, with all this business of moving in and all these new things that need accomplishing. New schools, new places that could be home. Still, when he finally fishes the key out and tosses it to Tooru across the table, sees the arc of his arm through the air as he catches it in one smooth motion, it feels like an anchor.

Tooru’s quiet for a moment, studying the keyring, his expression flat and inscrutable as it becomes sometimes when he’s deciding how to respond, what face to put on. The one he finally chooses is split down the middle—solemn as a statue, but Hajime knows that spark of mischief in his eye all too well, after all these years.

“Are you asking me to move in with you?”

“I’m giving this to you so you can let yourself in instead of hanging around outside like a stalker.” His face is too warm; he can feel the flush spreading down under the collar of his shirt. “You’d better not come too often, or I’ll get sick of your face.”

Tooru’s own place is all the way on the other side of the city. It’s far, but surprisingly easy to find. They’ve studied the maps—there’s just one train line connecting them, two stations on either end, and all the distance in between running so straight and true it’s impossible to lose their way.

“I’ll come every day,” he declares, twirling the keyring around one finger. “What’s yours is mine. What’s mine is also mine.”

It may or may not be a joke. Hajime’s used to that kind of uncertainty. It still doesn’t prepare him for when Tooru rises and crosses the room to where he stands, looping one arm around his waist and pushing his head down against the incline of Hajime’s shoulder. He’s even less prepared for the second key that Tooru digs out of his pocket and presses into his hand, fingertips lingering in his palm to cover all the things they’re both too embarrassed to say.

“What’s mine is yours too,” he says in Hajime’s ear. “Fair is fair.”

It’s unexpected, to say the least. That’s par for the course with Tooru; anticipating his movements has always been a little like chasing lightning, tracking the path of a storm. It’s a small mercy that Hajime’s apartment is much too small now for guessing games. Instead, he finds the answers to all his questions come in twos, a kind of proof he’s started uncovering piece by piece as they empty out the boxes together. Two keys, two futons in the hall closet, two toothbrushes. Two drawers—one left empty, just in case. There’s no need, at least not today, to guess at what it all means.

“Besides.” Tooru’s voice again, cutting in. “It’ll be good to change it up sometimes—your landlady might get jealous if she keeps seeing me around. I swear she’s half in love with you already.”

“My landlady is the sweetest old woman you will ever meet.” He flicks at Tooru’s forehead, hard enough to draw a high-pitched whine, but doesn’t push him away. In turn Tooru grins and pulls his arm in, drags him closer—and they stand this way, laughing, close together in the center of the unfurnished room. “And you’re a piece of shit.”

“A piece of shit that’s going to stay the night?”

Hajime rolls his eyes. “And stink up the whole damn place.”  


End file.
